Bridging the gap

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Definitely Maybe Agile with your hosts Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock. How are you today, Dave?

Excellent. It's been a great uh great week so far, and uh always looking forward to the conversation that we have to close out the week. So uh what's the topic of conversation this week?

Well, today we uh we were just chatting about this. Uh, I think talking about bridging the gap, and by this we mean uh the gap between technology and the the the business side of the organization. And uh I I I personally know that we have a problem already when we're talking about it as the business rather than our business, but that's probably a a way of starting to frame this a little. Uh so uh where would you like to start with this?

Well, um I mean let's let's think of that as tribes. We know there are lots of different tribes, and of course, if we're on the technology side and the business is on the business side, there's always well, between any tribe, there's a gap, right? So, and and I think the topic that we really want to address is we've talked a lot about transformation through the eyes of, well, let's say technology, through the eyes of that sort of technical digital implementation. But at some point, there has to be a bridging the gap between the technology side and the business side. Ultimately, any of that digital transformation has to deliver value which is leveraged and realized through the help of the business.

Uh I would agree. And I think one of the uh one of the pieces that uh we see, and we were talking about this a little before, is that that gap is getting narrower and narrower by the day. The the introduction of low-code and no code and easier access to technology and more sort of uh self-service drag and drop interfaces means that uh there's more accessibility to technology on the on the throughout the organization than ever before. And you can't just look at it as and uh there's just this technology department over here and they're gonna do all the technical stuff. It's the the whole organization is now becoming more aware um of technology and how it impacts uh how they do work, and has more access to actually start to change how they do work through that technology as well.

I I think in an extension, that's really like a modernizing extension of what's always been there, which is that uh in many cases the rest of the organization, through the partnerships, through the the delivery partners that they are working with, through through many of the services that they're purchasing and bringing into the organization, have always been technically rich in their understanding of what is out there. But the relationship between the technology group and the rest of the business is something that is continuing to see that shift. There's still room for that to sort of move into a stronger sort of strategic partner role than service provider or gatekeeper or compliance driver that is often still seen or still the case.

Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, I remember what would now be decades ago, a uh a part of uh the uh trading floor ordering 15 laptops, and with and we didn't realize why within technology until we realized they've gone and basically hired like a data specialist, and because IT wasn't responding fast enough, they basically strung them together to start to do their own analytics in the middle of the trading floor, and which which caused different other problems.

But but I think that that's one of the key things that we have to understand there is speed, right, and urgency that comes in. Um, what I find quite interesting looking at uh many scenarios that that we see around us today when we're working with various um institutions, is that sort of almost finally, or or it's the the the balance is shifting to whether technology really is faster than business in many situations and lots of parts of the organization, definitely not everywhere, but with the introduction of agility and DevOps and the technologies which are out there, which means that you know prototypes can be put together really, really quickly, and um that it's just things can move much more quickly. That speed balance is shifted over to technology. And one of the things that we find here is uh what I call the decision gap, the gap between when a business and an organization identifies a particular problem, resolves it, gets it into the market, and then sees the impact of that problem. Uh, that decision gap has always been quite long, measured in months or years. Uh, is now getting shorter and shorter, at least on the technology side. Um, but the the organization hasn't always readjusted their or re-geared their own way of making decisions, which means now it's almost like technology is moving faster than the rest of the organization, which highlights itself in trying to get any sort of sign-offs or release plans, product ownership, guidance, things like this. So it's some of the ways that we see that friction play out.

Yes, I I completely agree, and I've seen that in many places too. And one of the one of the activities that uh that we we look at in that space is when we look at um value stream mapping and value stream management, and you start to see that well, it there's there's technology over here that can innovate and start to put things together and develop uh solutions very, very quickly, but it's it takes months and months and months and months to actually get to the point of even asking to do that work or to start to experiment or to engage with technologies, start to think about the problem space. And and that time, if if you can identify and engage faster so that we can work together faster, then we become uh more effective at uh being able to innovate and get solutions to market faster. And it's not really anymore the as long as we're doing this well, the technology space that's the blocker that's the bottleneck to actually getting to the I I think that that shift is really interesting because the the speed of decision making is something I I'm just always drawn into the lean disciplines here, things like optimize the whole or deliver fast.

And when we look at that, I I'm it's actually funny you mentioned this because I'm thinking of the conversations that I've certainly been a part of when we're looking at things like optimize the whole, and it feels like we've got to extend that beyond technology. And when we talk about deliver fast, the the as you said, the the sort of focus has always been on why won't technology deliver quicker. And it's almost been flipped on its head now where we need to look at the organization to understand deliver fast from a customer context, and we understand need to understand optimize the whole from a customer experience, which we've been talking about for a long time, but isn't really becoming apparent until you unlock the speed in technology because otherwise that's always the stumbling block. And it does feel like we're kind of seeing a transition or a or a shift into a scenario where that customized customer-centric approach is really beginning to be something that can be lived and breathed, whereas before it was maybe more of an ideal objective.

Yeah, and and this is, I mean, from lean discipline, value streams, the entire concepts are all that's all that interrelationship, which requires from customer request through to the delivery of customer value and all of the activities that occur within the system of work to get there, all of those those concepts where we start to look at that and look at well, how did we get there? How do we align to that? And then more importantly, look at then if these are the these are the pieces that create that piece of customer value across the organization, not just within technology. Now we can start to see where are the the real bottlenecks occurring, and then it becomes a case of organizationally starting to consider how do we break the dependencies between these different pieces, because that's often then the next piece where we we run into problems where we have all of these we can identify these value streams, but we've got um deep-rooted dependencies within the organization because that's not necessarily how the organization is structured or aligned, and then we've got work to do to work out how we can start to make this work better.

Yeah, it's interesting. Even the terminology that we're using when we do talk about that, like dependencies, and I'm thinking of decoupling systems so that we've got more flexibility and speed is a very technical, yeah, technology-centric perspective. And I think part of that whole shift over there is recognizing there is a different vocabulary, there's a different driver, and so on that has to be kind of brought to the table, or or maybe the other way is technology has to get to that table to be able to talk as a strategic partner.

There's a uh there's a slide that I use in my presentations where I put uh uh the Rosetta stone up, you know, the translation is like a shopping list or shipping list between uh hieroglyphics through Latin and ancient Greek, I think. And it uh it's that translation that they use to be able to understand like what hieroglyphs are, and I use that as the sort of example of how the all the different parts of the organization are all talking their own language, and you need the ways of being able to work out how we can get these different areas to communicate.

Now, um let's touch on customer centricity versus product centricity. So we've talked on our in our conversations around product-centric thinking over project-centric thinking. How does customer-centric fit into that paradigm?

Well, well, I think I I was touching on it when I was talking about value streams, that I mean the to to map value streams to look at things from a like a value stream thinking perspective, there is there is customer value as the is the outcome of the value stream. So there has to be some customer value generated or it's not a value stream. And there's uh so that if we're thinking about our organizations in that term, then then that sort of drives that customer centricity. Uh, where I see the the product piece comes in is that in many organizations to get to that creation of customer value, there are multiple products potentially within the organization involved in that. And they may not necessarily align smoothly with the value streams as the the systems of work. There may be different ways that those are kind of organized, and starting to work out how do we um organize ourselves in those sort of dimensions, that's I think part of the work that needs to happen.

Yeah, there's a there's um so on the one hand, that sort of concept of cash that that Mary Popp and Dick mate um kind of popularized uh probably two decades ago now, with a book um flean software development. But um, in that that concept of cash suggests it's this pure linear single threaded view of a relationship with a customer. And I think the reality is, especially as we think of how um personalized services and our expectation when we go in, you know, we want to be greeted by by name in a in a in an appropriate way that that fits with what we're looking for right then and there. That means that customer-centric is an individual customer journey. And as soon as you go into that individual customer journey for, let's say, different personas, um, new family trying to get a home, since we're living in Vancouver and Toronto, that's obviously one of the ones that always gets talked about. But uh, there are many other um personas, each of those sort of customer threads, the journeys that are going through, may be using, maybe pulling from the same pool of product. And that's really the challenge is that a customer-centric view is is so variable and with so many different elements in it, it's not something that you can necessarily build an organization around unless you're, you know, it's nascent, you're just beginning to pull that together. So if you look at these bigger organizations, they have to take a product-centric view from a from a um complex, like to keep it simple and make it work perspective.

It it's interesting that actually one of the organizations that uh has managed to avoid that sort of line of line of business to product alignment type sort of macro model that you see that as organizations grow, this is naturally how they they start to divide up is uh Apple. Apple um is not organized like that, they're organized along uh technical expertise, but they've had to overcome a number of challenges as they've grown, especially over the last sort of 10 years, to maintain that structure because it does has become more difficult for them because they're and one of the problems they've run into is like it's the expansion of that executive board. If the for the expertise to remain uh basically along the delivery stream, we're gonna get a little bit technical here, then the the leader has to be the expert in that particular thing, but as the organization grows, it becomes harder and harder for you as a leader to be an expert in everything that possibly there is that um is within the domain because it's just too many different things. So, how do you uh like scale that model? You eventually end up in this point where what we what most organizations end up doing is they break it down into the like product silos and areas. What Apple did was they um they took a different approach around um dividing up leadership, but perhaps I think that's maybe a little more than we can get in today. Maybe that's a topic for another day, but I'll include a link to an article I was reading on this the other day. That would be great in the show notes.

And I do wonder as well, I mean, Apple is pretty much one of the largest companies in the world and has resources that are beyond many of us, right? As we look at that. Um I find uh when I look at the there's there's a huge focus right now on this kind of value stream perspective, and I think it's a good, it's it's you know, a great step forward. I've been doing a lot of reading, kind of kind of going back to Porter's value chain perspective of how organizations add value and what the the structure of the organization fits around it. And I think there is a lot of this, uh there is definitely a shift as we're talking about to this sort of speed perspective of how to get customer value out of the door. But we're with the the idea of a customer-centric view becomes harder and harder the larger the organization gets. I think you need it from a marketing perspective, a messaging, um, an understanding of what needs to be delivered and what services are up you can optimize that sort of product and service basket for particular personas and so on, but having a product-centric view technically for delivering still makes a lot of sense.

So, if we were to sum this up in three points, we've kind of touched on a number of different pieces from like organizational design, value streams, bridging the gap. Where are we going?

So I I think we've we've just kind of peeled the lid back on quite a gnarly challenge, which is that whole customer-centric versus product-centric. But I think that one is something which is a topic of conversation that continues to touch on this whole bridging the gap between technology and the organization as a whole. Um the the second point that I'd come to is the the fact that the gears have shifted on the technology, they are now delivering fast. Speed is a big part of what is happening in the technology area. And I'm not so sure that that's always bled over into the organization in terms of getting those gears right. So, what I think of that kind of uh customer decision gap or the the the decision gap between what your customers are seeing and how ideas that concept a cash piece uh there, there's still something to be worked on there. They're they're out of step, I think, in a way that they weren't out of step before, they're out of step in a different way before. Um, and that isn't really being discussed or perhaps being addressed necessarily. And then I but I think the other side is that more and more that gap is smaller, right? That it it is it is as we discussed right at the outset, it's more about different tribes than it is silos. And tribes can bang into one another, and they you know you can morph those much more easily, and they're much closer than they may appear. Um, whereas I think uh in the past it's always been a little bit more us and them. I think nowadays we're really all on the in the same boat, much, much closer together. That gap is smaller than it's ever been.

I'd agree. I think that I think there's definitely still a ways to go, especially in our larger, more complex organizations, but uh I think there's a greater understanding uh in general of technology and how it can be applied and access to it becomes easier. So it's people have a greater understanding of those pieces. Um I think that there's some spaces there to explore too. Well, well, thank you as always, uh Dave. It's uh always a pleasure. Um and uh if anyone wants to reach out, they can at feedback at definitely maybeagile.com. And I look forward to next time. Okay, until next time again, Peter. Pleasure. You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock focus on the art and science of digital, agile, and DevOps scale.